The day before the last presidential election, my wife and I drove from Washington, DC to the eastern shore of Maryland. Inside the Beltway, we saw a few small Hillary signs but not as many as you might expect near a town where Democrats are monolithic. Outside the Beltway, there were no Clinton signs. Trump adverts, in contrast, out in the sticks, were ubiquitous and billboard large. Two years hence, we drove south this time into Virginia and noticed that many rural Trump signs were still up. We even saw “Reelect Trump” buttons at a farmers market. Two years in, working America seems to get, or appreciate, something about Trump that dependent, or should we say liberal, America does not.

If you read city newspapers, watch television, or live in mom’s basement with an iPhone; you might never know that Donald Trump actually has a constituency. You would never know that many folks, beyond the urban cloister, do not see Trump as an ogre. You would never know that the Trump regime puts some porridge in the pot. Hapless spin and bias of media pundits and pollsters didn’t matter much before the last presidential election and still doesn’t seem to matter today.

Achievement, however, still matters!

Reporters, talking heads, and pollsters persist, nevertheless, still trashing Trump. Indeed, the “dump Trump” movement, right and left, might now be a case of bias metastasizing into bigotry. Excess offends most where it matters most; midst the open spaces, open minded, and the “undecided” voters.

Call them “swingers,” if you must.

Trump’s most virulent critics, if nothing else, are consistently oblivious to national sub-rosa sentiment. Political autism on the robotic left is trending. Keith and Pocohantas are waiting in the wings to succeed Bernie and Hillary. If clueless were clams and spuds, the Democratic National Committee would be chowder.

Trump’s critics have created the very monster populist they so deplore. Strawman indeed! Meanwhile, fair play still matters to open minds, flyover country, swing votes, that fickle middle.

Beltway heartburn on the far right is chronic too, as Trump keeps making noises about “draining the swamp” in Washington; a signal threat to entrenched deep state denizens at DOD, State, Justice, and the Intelligence Community. Trump is the first politician in modern times to suggest that the deep state might actually be the “creep state,” a privileged sty where entrenched, unelected, tenured, self-interested porkers rule indefinitely.

Reduced to essentials, the Trump revolution may be about real democracy, that eternal struggle between the elect and the select. Trump’s critics are a Cobb Salad of timid drones and media camp followers who see Trump as a threat to unelected, tenured power, a threat to federal honey pots and sugar teats.

These days, to put it bluntly; the Civil Service, the Foreign Service, and security services are apparently half truths. A hostile deep state appears willing to destroy democracy in order to save it, denial in fact and in deed.

We hear many complaints about Trump’s taxes, business dealings, and personal finances. Compared to Uncle Sam and Jenkins Hill, the Trump Empire is a model of fiduciary, budgetary, and fiscal rectitude. If Congress were as good at managing the public purse, we might all be living large in cribs like Mar-a-Largo.

For socialists, Trump is a primal threat. Ideology matters most to fanatics. Just as social democrats and globalists were getting over the loss of Stalin, Mao, Castro, Heidegger, and Coco Chanel; along comes Hillary riding in Bill’s shade. Trump didn’t have much of a hand to begin with, but apparently a predator’s wife isn’t the ace of hearts either.

For the American left, Donald’s sins are too numerous to catalogue, yet in the interest of balance we should mention a few. Trump is rich, well groomed, white, successful, much married, sexually active, and fertile. He might wed often, but he supports his children and ex-wives in style. He doesn’t drink, snort drugs, smoke weed, sport tattoos or piercings, wear a man bun, or play Lotto. In short, Donald Trump has all the baggage of success that envy loves to hate.

But let’s be candid, the Donald is still a bit of an odd canard. He comes to high office by way of Queens, Wharton, condo sales, serial wives, game shows, beauty pageants, casinos, and hutzpah. His political chops are more than slightly irregular, but at the same time, very, very New York. Nothing succeeds like excess. Trump’s civic deficits are many too; he’s not a shyster, not a professional politician, not an orator, not a Bezos bozo, nor is he an accomplished ass kisser.

A Trump Tweet or press conference is often like a bizarre trap shoot. On any given day, he might take out a pigeon – or blow off one of his wing tips. Like no other politician in memory, Donald Trump has weaponized candor. After three thousand years, he had the hutzpah to call Jerusalem the Jewish capital! Talk about brass. Trump’s saving grace with sub-rosa voters may his willingness to butcher the English language and any sacred cow in the public square.

Back in the day, in the east Bronx, I ran with a mug in the same Fordham neighborhood where Trump spent two years in college. My chum was never as wealthy or educated as Trump, but just as arrogant. Tommy D was one of those kids who swaggered like a much larger animal. He didn’t necessarily look for fights, but they seemed to find him anyway. He once clocked a masher on a bus, and then got jumped by four more for his trouble.

Tommy wore his mangled nose like a bent badge of courage. He wasn’t bigger or stronger than other mutts, but he wouldn’t stay down either, he just kept coming, no matter the odds. He intimidated most comers because he never quit. With Thomas, round two was always a certainty.

Hard to know whether Trump was ever that kind of hard case growing up in Queens, although a stint in military school followed by two years at Fordham in the Bronx may explain his moxie. He does love a good fight. Trump will put a rhetorical fist on your snot locker at the drop of a hat.

If we can milk a cliché for a moment; it’s not the size of the dog in a fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. Trump is a happy warrior. He is willing to take on the fatties and the fatuous. Critics underestimate his appeal to the every-day poll troll, folks that fib to Pew or Nielsen. Trumpsters, like swallows, fly under the radar.

Sub-rosa support for Trump is a new guilty pleasure.

Thus far, Trump is smarter and more agile than his critics. He is unpredictable and unprecedented, yet his madness has method. For Zuckerberg zombies, an app like Twitter is just another adolescent ego toy. For Trump, Twitter allows the White House to set the table daily at dawn, before critics can brush their teeth or find their panties.

All politics may be local, but all politicians are about personality. Trump is larger than life – and Pocahontas too. Not necessarily a good man, but possibly a great man. American politics has never seen a Presbyterian like Donald Trump. Were he to get hit by a Tesla tomorrow, his time in office will still be historic.

Trump’s great strengths are the excesses of his enemies and the stupidity of his haters. Rosanne Barr gets it. Few other do. Trump thrives in the mystic middle. He doesn’t have anything to lose or gain, except reelection. For the gainfully employed, the harried taxpayer, and all good souls taken for granted; a dollar-a-year man at the top is simple math – and poetic justice.

Barack Obama era national security acolytes, now serving under Donald Trump, are not doing much to help with or clarify American foreign policy or national security futures.

The Ummah provides the best example.

Just days after the Trump inauguration, the newly minted CIA director, Michael Pompeo, flew off to Saudi Arabia to present Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, with a medal for “counterterrorism” efforts (sic). Saudi Arabia is America’s most generous arms customer, indeed the largest buyer worldwide.

The ties that bind America to Arabia are first pecuniary and then political.

Yes, the same Saudi Arabia that produced the 9/11 terrorists, the same House of Saud that finances and arms global Sunni jihad and terror in the Levant and North Africa, and the same Arabia that exports the worst kind of Islamic irredentist theology to the rest of the world gets another azimuth kiss from an American Intelligence nabob.

Irony here is beyond satire. The medal in question is named after George Tenet. Tenet is the CIA director who, with Colin Powell’s help, fabricated the fake intelligence that gave America the ongoing 30 year religious war in Iraq; a war we might add, that reversed the sectarian power poles in Iraq from Sunni to Shia.

A White House that claims that America is not at war with Isalm, now doubles down with Saudi Sunnis against Shia Yeminis in another proxy religious war in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia has long denied complicity with Islamism, Sunni terrorism, or wars motivated by a 1400 year old religious schism. Now Riyadh has a CIA medal provided by team Trump to prove it.

Meanwhile over at the National Security Council, newly christened director, H.R McMaster, is apparently laying down a companion party line about Islam with White House staff. General McMaster cautions that terms like “radical Islamic terror” are not helpful. According to the General, “terror is not Islamic.”

Like many millennial era flags, the new national security advisor seems to have succumbed to the Obama thought police. Surely not all Islamists are terrorists, but virtually all terrorists these days are Muslims, Mohammedans who kill in the name of their god, their prophet, and Islam – the “religion of peace.”

“Allah hu akbar” is what an Islamist chants at a beheading, bombing, and other sanguinary rituals. Links between terror and Islam are more real than any links between US Army generals and analytical theology.

Who is McMaster to pontificate on what is or is not Islamic? The national security advisor is not an imam, ayatollah, prophet, priest, or religious scholar. Based on recent sermons, he’s not much of a historian either.

Over at the Department of Defense, another scholarly warrior seems to be confused about real threats too. The new Secretary of Defense, like Obama era staffers, shoots from the hip at the “Russian” chimera and personalizes the assessment with trash talk about Vladimir Putin.

At confirmation, General James Mattis rose to every leading question from John McCain, the Senate’s most notorious Kremlin baiter. Mattis swallowed McCain’s practiced political demagoguery hook, line, and sinker.

Mattis also failed to distinguish between a threat that actually kills Americans today and a threat that might. Worse still, General Mattis’ sweeping indictments of “Russians” fails to distinguish between a proud nation and a regime that doesn’t fit the globalist EU/imperial NATO business plan.

NATO began as an allied mutual security pact and the EU began as a modest economic condominium. Both institutions have strayed far from original designs and the world is not safer place because of it. Brussels is now populated by political autocrats and imperial janissaries. Hat tip to a Turk or Ottoman model.

If sweeping vile assessments of Muslims are unacceptable, why is sweeping slander about Israelis or Russians allowed? Is selective bigotry at the Pentagon now a military virtue?

Indeed, after leaving the military, Mattis claimed that Israeli “settlements” and “apartheid” made his job at CENTCOM more difficult. The general’s also says that there was “a price to be paid” for backing Israel, a sneer that is vintage David Petraeus.

General Mattis claims that “Russia needs to prove itself.” In contrast, apparently, no Islamic country, especially Palestinians and allied Arabs, need to prove anything to America, the world, or the new Secretary of Defense.

The sad truth of the European Union and NATO today is a tragic combination official Islamic tolerance and official indifference to parallel anti-Semitism. The western migration of fascist Islam comes again at the expense of European Jews. The worst history is often invisible to historians.

Mattis also gave the Senate a selective recap of Russia/American relations as a closer to his testimony. The self- described student of military history failed to mention the last world war where, without Russian sacrifice, the battle with secular fascism would not have been won. The United States lost less than half a million casualties in WWII. Russia lost more than 20 million souls.

Now that Europe and America are confronted with fascism again, this time religious, General Mattis and other Obama holdovers are still confused or mute about who or what is a genuine threat in the 21st Century.

The best guarantors of civil and human rights are independent, democratic nation states with common cultural and civic values. Monoculture anywhere has always been the enemy of liberty and true diversity everywhere.

All globalist or utopian schemes, now including the EU, have been failures. General Mattis is wrong about NATO too. Sort of nuclear Armageddon, NATO provides little stability for the Mideast, Africa, or anyplace beyond Europe for that matter.

Mattis seems to have misread the Brexit and Frexit graffiti now defacing the walls of the European Union.

Candidate Trump ran on a tougher line with Islamists and a softer line with the Kremlin. Such policies are heresy for the establishment, right and left, in Washington. Any diminution of the Russian threat is a clear and present danger to the DOD budget and legions of Intelligence and defense industry federal contractors.

No big Russian threat, no big funding.

Obama era rear echelon warriors have yet to get the message from Trump or appreciate the angst of “deplorables” in the heartland. Maybe the new commander-in-chief needs to speak louder – or carry a bigger stick

President Trump has few friends in the media, few friends among Obama holdovers, and fewer friends or loyalists midst permanent or deep state government bureaucrats inside the Beltway. Washington D.C. and the surrounding suburbs voted for Hillary Clinton by a margin of nine to one. Those votes, like California, were votes for a deep state where change is either “progressive” – or anathema.

And those who claim that establishment apparatchiks, including the Pentagon, are “non-partisan” are delusional. The only currency in the nation’s capital is politics. The most lucrative politics are found now in the defense and Intelligence bowels of the permanent state.

Obama era military relics are no exceptions to partisanship. Outsiders, critics, and reformers are not welcome in Washington, especially at the Pentagon. National security and Intelligence Community leaks now underwrite the anti-democratic, anti-Trump resistance on a daily basis.

Donald Trump is trying to reform or change a federal autocracy that is populated with Clinton and Obama loyalists. For those weaned on the nanny state, reform is just a turd in the establishment punchbowl.

Willingness to serve in government should never be confused with loyalty, especially inside the Beltway. Harry Truman said it best. If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

Much of what Donald Trump said during the 2016 campaign seemed to be braggadocio, bombast, and on occasion, a kind of non-specific cranial buzz. Still, if you listened carefully, and ignored the ambient noise, there was always a message in most of his rhetoric; signals that were usually lost or ignored by a smug and hostile Fourth Estate.

Trump’s Signals

Immigration is a problem. Neither Mexicans nor Muslims are ideal immigrants, yet the former are to be preferred over the latter. The left coast and Hollywood, ironically, might fall into the sea without cheap labor and drugs from Mexico.

The East Coast is little better. Washington, DC is corrupt, a haven for patronizing, condescending, elite apparatchiks, right and left.

The DNC was trying to cook the Democrat Party primaries and general election. The press, broadcast networks, CPB, and the Intelligence Community get honorable mention as sous chefs.

The gruesome foursome now rationalizes defeat as a Russian conspiracy. Vladimir Putin put it best, “The American party that calls itself ‘democratic’ seems to have forgotten what democracy means.”

The Clintons are shameless frauds. Hillary is the most corrupt person ever to run for high office. Her loss is the country’s gain.

The Pentagon along with the Intelligence Community are not sacred cows; bovine, expensive, and proliferate maybe, but not sacred.

The EU and NATO, like Swedish hippy communes, might be globalist or Utopian experiments gone horribly wrong. Allies who will not pay or play should not stay. All coalitions, like sausage, have a sell-by date.

Obama’s only real claims to legacy are a failed health care boondoggle, a Muslim world in flames, and a touch of melanin, the latter a glass half-full at best.

American media, and the Intelligence Community, are not objective reporters anymore, if they ever were. Fake partisan news and propaganda are now joint ventures. The US State Department, for example, is now, by law, the official host to an American “Ministry of Truth” funded by defense appropriations.

Trump is correct also about the Washington, DC swamp. It needs to be drained.

Sooner is better.

Signals and Noise

During the 2016 primaries and election campaign, party elites and a sycophantic media engineered a gauntlet for Trump that ran from ridicule, to contempt, to hostility, to vindictiveness. All of which are now reduced to childish tantrums. Ironically, Michelle Obama claims that the White House needs “adult” (sic) leadership. Surely, given the post-election behavior of camp Clinton/Obama and the American left, she cannot be thinking of her husband, his spokesmen, his cabinet, or the Democrat Party.

How is the eleventh hour vote against Israel at the UN anything but juvenile or petulant rage? How is the 11th hour expulsion of Russian diplomats anything but adolescent sour grapes?

In any campaign, data and statistics are manipulated for advantage. The 2016 election might be a case study. Hard to believe that all that polling and all those statistical forecasts could have been so universally wrong without someone cooking the books.

Feint signals from the real world since the Trump victory provide anecdotal hints of a cultural sea change. Disparate icons such as Clint Eastwood and Henry Kissinger may not have been all in for Trump but both have made sober, if not optimistic, assessments of the next administration.

We know what Eastwood thinks after decades of millennial political correctness. And Dr. Kissinger says that Donald Trump represents an “extraordinary opportunity.”

Indeed!

The great failing of statistical analysis is that it seldom accommodates relevant factors which cannot be conveniently quantified. Such analysis will often ignore inconvenient truths too, arithmetic that might not support expected outcomes.

Trump campaign rallies were an example. Big Trump numbers were largely ignored whilst Mrs. Clinton’s often anemic attendance figures were seldom revealed. One day in Florida, a couple of Tim Kaine rallies had to be cancelled due to an interest deficit while a Trump rally a few miles away was drawing thousands.

The national TV networks could not believe their lying eyes. Minor anti-Trump protests might make the evening news, but huge enthusiasm gaps were seldom covered in any detail. Every good spin master knows that books are cooked with two sets of numbers, select facts and facts that are ignored altogether.

The old saw that claims “figures don’t lie, but liars still figure” comes to mind. Just as the Fourth Estate missed or misconstrued numbers and facts in the campaign, there are now some significant signals in post-election statistics, numbers that team Trump ignore at their peril.

Blue Wall Moves To Washington

The District of Columbia and surrounding bedroom communities in Virginia and Maryland supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 by wide margins. This is the federal government demographic; bureaucrats, contractors, and a host of camp followers living off the taxpayer dime.

The socialist heart of the left is still beating in Big Brother’s crib. Neither Pennsylvania Avenue nor the District of Columbia and suburbs is Trump country.

Mythology runs neck-to-neck with fake news in Washington. The non-partisan myth is the most pervasive, the shibboleth that suggests that the civil service, Foreign Service, the Intelligence Community, or defense officials are impartial, political eunuchs. In fact, the size of the federal behemoth, deficit spending and debt, is a function of entrenched socialist illusions, a bond that unites both political parties.

Bigger is always better inside the Beltway. Few souls get to, or thrive in, any federal office by arguing for less of anything.

District of Columbia voting habits are probative. Over 90 percent of the presidential vote in 2016 went to Democrats. Less than one in ten supported Trump. The District is half white and half black, yet both liberal demographics preferred Hillary Clinton. When Trump comes to town, the Beltway will be the new blue wall of active/passive political aggressors; a blue wall of press, politicians, apparatchiks, non-profits, lobbies, and associated contractors.

The DC civil service cohort and associated camp followers are many things. Good loser isn’t one of them. Trump has his work cut out in the capital and it begins with bureaucratic hostility and inertia.

Still, the president elect has the edge coming in. His critics continue to underestimate or misconstrue Trump and his game. Trump plays politics like the Patriots play football.

The best defense is good offensive – and stout leadership.

Trump’s early appointments are significantly offensive! The generals have landed. No accident that Marines are leading the charge. Battles to breach the new blue wall, the DC Beltway, and “make America great again,” will require more than a little hand-to-hand street fighting.

A new year indeed! Whether or not 2017 is “happy,” remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, America says God speed to the Trump beach head and Semper Fidelis to those valiant centurions on point in DC.

There are many things that can be said about the election of Donald Trump and most will probably get said before 20 January 17. Beyond an unlikely candidacy and an even more surprising election, Trump, long before his inauguration, is an overachiever on many fronts. Indeed, a “Reelect Trump” bumper sticker was spotted in Easton, Maryland just a day after the election. Here are the top ten things Trump has already accomplished before his first term begins.

He Hijacked a Major American Party

Just as the Democrats had a coronation planned for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Republicans had a tiara in mind for Jeb Bush too. Alas, Donald Trump beat the odds, and the party hacks, for the Republican nomination. The Grand Old Party has yet to recover from the insurgent coup.

Withal, Republicans need Trump more than Trump needs a party. Either the old guard adjusts to Trump’s pragmatism or Trump might start a new party. Clearly he has the votes.

The Democrats too were bull-rushed by the Clintons, then gob smacked by Trumpsters.

News on the left keeps getting worse. Democrats are now looking to the Minnesota caliphate for new blood, considering Representative Keith Ellison (D) as party chief. Elevating Ellison is a little like playing Russian roulette with five rounds in the cylinder. Ellison isn’t so much a progressive as he is an outspoken Islamist huckster and anti-Israeli demagogue.

Seems the DNC learned nothing from the election.

He Bitch- Slapped American Media

There’s no polite way to put this. American press and broadcast shills, nationally and universally, tried to cook the 2016 primaries and general election with bias, lies, vitriol, hate, and racism. Both parties and the media insinuated, with little or no evidence, that the Republican nominee was a Kremlin stooge. Trump took it all in and gave as good as he got. He was correct throughout, the press, the federal cops, and Clinton Inc. are “crooked.”

When it counted, America’s productive “deplorables” turned out to be a lot more reliable than America’s dependent barnacles. If there is a demographic schism in America, the divide is between the makers and the takers. Score one this time for “makers” and family Trump.

Next time the media sneers at non-college graduates, blue collar men/ women, or “flyover country;” those cynics would do well to remember that folks with enough moxie to get a job and work for a living are the same citizens who get off their keisters and vote.

The press tried to lynch Trump for what he said while largely giving Hillary a pass on what she has done. Sensible voters took that double standard personally. The country will recover from Trump rhetoric long before voters will forget how badly the Clintons, print and broadcast “professionals” behaved.

Trust is a terrible thing to waste.

He restored Political Integrity

When Hillary drones chirped “I’m with her,” Trump responded “I’m with you.” When the vice president elect was asked about Trump’s character, Mike Pence replied “you can’t fake good kids.” When Hillary was asked about those huge “pay to play,” checks, she responded, “I took what they offered.” When Trump was asked about his presidential salary, he said that he will be a “dollar a year man.”

Even when the question is relative, character matters.

When asked if Trump might make America great again, deplorables across the country responded with a resounding “yes.”

HeSaved the Judicial System

With the election victory, Trump gets a judicial trifecta: some balance on the highest court and the opportunity to clean house at the Justice Department and the FBI. Recall that Justice Sotomayor suggested that race and melanin were unique sensitivities. Also recall that Justice Ginsberg campaigned very publically against Trump, an unprecedented breach of judicial temperament and discretion. With any luck, these two and the Keystone cops at the Justice department should be history or irrelevant under a new court and administration.

He Torpedoed Immigration Inertia

For decades, both political parties have played kick-the-can with border security and immigration. Indeed, associated pathologies like drugs, crime, and terror have been neglected or minimized. Even after the Saudi 9/11suicide bombings, political paralysis prevailed. In the recent campaign, Trump used the now famous “wall” metaphor to illuminate the unalloyed stupidity of open borders and uncontrolled, unvetted immigration of refugees, Muslim or Mexican.

Trump has put an eminently logical question on the table. How do we have open borders and insure national security or the defeat of terror and the Muslim jihad?

A nation is safe, secure, and sovereign – or it is not.

He Made Emigration Fashionable

Many Hollywood poseurs, low-rent music divas, media fan boys, and their big city cohorts have vowed to leave America if Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

Poor loser day is here. Flyover country is waiting. If left coasters are moving north this year, they need to start for Canada before the snow flies.

Note to Robert De Niro, Whoopi Goldberg, and Amy Schumer: Please stop on the east coast and pick up Chuck Schumer, Chris Matthews, and Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. on your way out.

He Reset the US Foreign Policy Agenda

Trump suggests adjustments to policy with Europe, Russia, Israel, and the Muslim world are needed. Winning is back on the table too. If the various Muslim small wars cannot be won with EU or Ummah partners, then new coalitions make sense. Israel is the indispensable moral center of gravity in the Middle East. Russia is the indispensable ally for defeating Islamism and the jihad.

Stand by for Putin/Trump and Netanyahu/Trump bromances to be consummated.

He Burst the Globalism Bubble

If the fatally flawed assumptions of globalism and world government were wounded by Brexit, a Donald Trump presidency might be the coup de grace. By challenging feckless interventions, naïve foreign policy, weak trade deals, and flaccid partners/alliances; Donald Trump has turned US foreign/ military policy on its ear, all to the good.

New thinking and new players are long overdue. The true path to global diversity is national sovereignty, not the rote of EU or UN globalist conformity. Trump’s skepticism about utopian hokum is fresh air.

He Cashiered Humanitarian Intervention

With Trump, disastrous small wars associated with so-called “humanitarian” interventions may be resolved or allowed to die on the vine. “In it to win it or out” might be the new doctrine from the start. If Europe and the Muslim world care not to finance or fight for the defeat of Islamism, so be it. The target set for America, Russia, and China is thus simplified.

Even James Clapper now agrees that America cannot save Islam from itself.

He purged three Dynasties

Armed only with the wisdom of crowds, Trump brought an end to the Bush, Clinton, and Obama regimes. Call it regicide. Call it a political trifecta. Call it hiatus from breeding lawyers in the White House. Whatever! The prospects for loony liberals and chronically constipated conservatives are greatly diminished in the next four, or eight, years.

If the president elect is as cost efficient as Commander –in-Chief as he was as a candidate, then America may be well served. In spite of an unprecedented media and Clinton Inc. bias blitz, Trump demonstrated that ground truth is the often the default setting in a digital world – if the internet, not the press, does the vetting.

Epilogue

The most obvious post-election irony comes from the mean streets of American cities, liberal urban sinecures where Clinton/Obama voters riot and vandalize in the wake of defeat, validating the worst about the American Left; first arrogant winners, now bad losers at every turn.

Maureen Dowd at the NY Times once pandered to Barack Hussein Obama as the “black prince.” As is their wont, the Times was only half right. Alas, the euphemistic prince turned out to be just another spooky “gangsta” from Chicago, a black swan who never flew, never set a better standard for America or arsonous constituents.

Withal, a quarter century national nightmare may now be over. There’s much to celebrate in 2016, thanks to “deplorables” across the land.

A single fatal shibboleth stalks political elites on the Right. This is the confused notion that Republicans must mimic the Democrat Left to be successful in presidential races. When you take a hard look a recent political memes, what you see is the inexorable drift back to a neo-Marxist model: special pleaders, onerous taxes, intemperate spending, deficit, debt, and bigger, yet incompetent and unaccountable government at all levels. Social democracy seems to be crumbling in slow motion.

Need we mention Flint, Michigan or Baltimore, Maryland as exemplars? Baltimore merely sets itself afire; Flint literally poisons constituents. First, the city goes broke and then the same dingbats who rode profligacy to ground now maim their citizens with lead laden water in the name of economy. Flint, like most urban centers in America, is a broken liberal monopoly, a polity that will shop until it literally drops – or squanders taxes until you drop. A dependent activist majority on the left now defines the agenda for an ever shrinking passive, yet barely productive, minority. Democracy, as a virtue, may be reaching its sell-by date.

Not that performance is any better inside the Beltway. Washington has invested in wasteful serial wars abroad that no one at DOD or the US State Department has any intention of winning. Here; debt, deficit, and the dead don’t matter. When it comes to lives that matter, the only difference between Michigan and Iraq or Afghanistan is that you are likely to get maimed or killed quicker in those remote Muslim wars than you will in Michigan or Maryland. Pointless sacrifices in either case. Indeed, if you included foreigners in the body count, poor policy choices have killed more folks in the past decade than all Islamic terror groups combined. That’s a number that you will never see above the fold.

Dying for democracy or freedom is one thing. Dying for elected incompetence, or political cowards and their ephemeral legacies, is something else. The dark side of democracy is the inclination to vote for the worst among us. The most offensive part of the wasted treasure and lives, abroad especially, is the companion banality. To wit: the enemy is not named, war is not declared, Islam is appeased, and those serial failures in the Ummah have no names or expiration dates.

The horns of modern conflict dilemma are two; no foreseeable end to small wars and no humane solution to the predictable refugee problem – no solutions short of open borders and cultural fratricide. After a decade of dithering, the great national security questions are now “when” not what or if.

Now comes another American presidential election in 2016, dominated again, for the most part, by politically correct conventional wisdom on both sides of the aisle. Donald Trump is now a no man’s land of candor between two pandering major American political factions. With the decisive women’s vote in play, the Republicans are now “feministing” along with Democrats. Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina is the now the femme face du jour for establishment Republicans. Haley is celebrated, right and left, as a rising political star.

She made the PC honor role by lowering a flag symbolic of Southern history and select racial scabs that just will not heal. No healing because state houses and the White House keep scratching racial sensitivities until they bleed. If all tainted American icons must fall, why not the Jefferson Memorial, Monticello, Mount Vernon, and every town and city in America named after George Washington?

If we are to take down all the monuments to all heroes who have fallen out of favor with millennials, then we might clear the public squares across America, starting with the capital. Indeed, Marion Barry could replace Thomas Jefferson at the Tidal Basin. Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric could be replaced with rap, rant, or doggerel such as: “The bitch set me up.”

Withal, veiled history is still history. The past cannot be altered by fiat, felled statues — or flags.

Gov. Haley was invited up from Dixie to respond to the President’s State of the Union address. Faced with a target rich field on a national stage, you might think that Nikki would go after Obama or Clinton. No, Haley didn’t make headlines for any critique of Democrats. She is now above the fold for friendly fire, a lame attack on Donald Trump. Clearly, Nikki is channeling the RNC.

Specifically, Haley accused Trump of being “angry,” as if anger would be a handicap in 2016. Trump volleyed with effect, accepting the angry label as the legitimate mantel for the mood of apostates in both parties.

The Haley cheap shot is a symptom of all that Trump rants about: clueless political elites, especially the Republican establishment. Ironically, Republicans are slip streaming Democrat operatives; playing the same shame game and trying to “tango foxtrot” the front runners. Nomenklatura of both parties are conspiring to veto the people’s choice, a foolish gambit especially for the righteous Right. Blue collar, evangelical, and conservative stay-at-home votes made Mitt Romney a footnote in the last election.

If Trump picks up his marbles and goes back to making money in 2016, he will take a legion of unhappy voters with him — and Clinton III becomes a sure thing. Nikki Haley may have her own agenda too, a preference for any woman, even Hillary, rather than Trump. Playing the race and vagina cards in the primaries is usually a tactic of the left. Republican elites, by moving left too, are perilously close to alienating the angry, ethical, God fearing, hardworking, productive, and taxpaying demographics. Political apathy, like civic enthusiasm, is a created culture.

If conservative thinkers worthy of the name had any good instincts, they would allow the primaries to play out, winner take all. Let democracy work the way it is supposed to. Trust the wisdom of crowds. Who needs another anointed, politically correct shape shifter?

At the moment, unfortunately, the usual media pundits and the RNC have taken their eyes off the ball. Instead of illuminating Clinton sleaze, Republicans are directing most brickbats at their own front runner. Mrs. William Clinton’s most significant qualification for high office is her husband’s coat tails. Indeed, Hillary may be the worst possible role model for women, wives, and girls in America.

If Trump gets the Republican nod, consider all the talent he has to choose from for vice president, cabinet posts, and department heads. The Republican bench is deep: a woman CEO, an accomplished black surgeon, two Hispanic pit bulls, and several portly, yet experienced, white governors. Politics and governing are team sports.

Hilary’s bench is two shades of pasty white far left pandering, including a profligate socialist and, yes, a former mayor of smoke stained Baltimore, Maryland.

Donald Trump, warts and all, makes a better candidate than he does a defector. Republicans need to recalibrate their gun sights on the Obama/Clinton camps. Imagine, if it helps, Bernie Sanders as US Secretary of the Treasury.